Best uses of virtualization for webapp development

Question

I'm preparing to upgrade my main development system to Ubuntu 9.10. Previously it was running 8.10 with no virtualization. I'd like to start taking advantage of the virtualization technologies built into the newer release, but am unsure what kinds of best practices there are for doing this. Although I'm using Ubuntu, answers for other platforms could be useful.

I typically use the following during development:

• Maven
• Eclipse
• MySQL
• Firefox/Firebug
• Chrome

Does it make sense to set up the base system with no software installed? And then set up virtual machines for doing development? Or should I just install maven/eclipse/etc. into the main host system? Or should I use a VM per project? Or a VM for each tool I use? How can I best take advantage of snapshots, etc?

For instance, if I am testing/debugging an app in Chrome, I might restart the browser many times. So it would be nice to have it running in a separate VM so I can have another Chrome instance running with tabs open for my issue-tracker, javadocs, google research, etc. without it needing to keep getting restarted.

I guess I'm looking for examples of how others have things configured and the pros and cons to doing it that way.

Answer 1

What do you want to use virtualization for? It is a technology, what do you need it for?

If you want to know and understand this technology, just create a virtual single machine, install BSD/Linux/OpenSolaris/etc. and the playground is yours. Experiment with networking, snapshots etc.

Separating a developement environment - just for the kick - between virtual machines does not make any sense to me. Snapshots are quite heavyweight and are no replacement for Subversion and regular backups.

Scenarios worth considering virtualization:

• You have a single but powerful machine in the organization, and you would like to give each team a complete dev/build environment so they have full control over their own environment but also do not interference with each other.
• Your application has many tiers (it includes a web server, database, voip server, auth server...), so you deploy them into a virtual machine. You have a dev, test and production image and you can easily roll out a new version by changing netwoking settings on the host machine.
• Because of security/integratability requirements you have to deploy your tiers into separate state spaces, you choose virtualization for this.
• Different teams, projects or application require an own IP address or the same port and providing a physical machine for each would be a waste of resources.

Use virtualization only if you would need to separate stuff on different physical machines. It just gives you the ability to do this virtually.